Mazda has barely thrown off the shackles of Ford, but the Japanese already make their new freedom felt. In a way that won’t make Ford happy.

Mazda and their new largest shareholder Sumitomo will spend anywhere between $350m and $475m, and will open a plant in Mexico that will start making lots of little Mazdas as early as 2013. According to The Nikkei [sub], Mazda will build its bread & butter Mazda2 and Mazda3 models in Mexico. They will not be shipped north. The cars are destined for the Mexican, Brazilian, and other Central and South American markets. Mazda will initially make some 100,000 units there, later more. An engine plant is also in the cards.

This marks a series of firsts for Mazda. Read More >

AutoWeek reports:

GM’s stock may be hovering near its IPO price of $3/share, but the UAW doesn’t need much more growth to cash out with every penny it wanted from GM. The UAW’s VEBA account has banked $3.4b in stock sales so far, and Forbes reports

The VEBA will break even on its investment if it can sell the remaining 206 million shares at an average price of $36.96.

Taxpayers, meanwhile, need GM’s stock to top at least $52/share in order to break even on the bailout that it funded. Because it’s just not a bailout unless the least deserving benefit the most. Meanwhile, with its accounts once again flush with cash, the UAW is turning South in hopes of accomplishing what it has never accomplished before: unionizing at ransplant auto factory in a right-to-work, Southern state.

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Bill Mitchell, only the second man to head General Motors styling when he took over from the monumental Harley Earl, was not a man about whom people were impartial. GM’s official history reveres him. Harley Earl’s family reviles him. His coworkers and subordinates at GM either loved him or despised the man. Even landmark designs that were signatures of his reign at GM Styling, the split-window 1963 Corvette Sting Ray and the boat tail Rivieras, are polarizing designs that had detractors, including some on the GM Styling staff. He admittedly ran that department like a dictator, though he rarely fired anyone. Mercurial in temper, he’d have screaming fits at his design staff, laced with the most vulgar epithets, then defuse the tension with an offhand joke as he left the room. Shamelessly ambitious and self-promoting, often taking personal credit for his staffs’ designs, had the term “larger than life” not existed, Mitchell would have coined it to describe himself.

By today’s standards of workplace political correctness, diversity and racial and sexual harassment law, Bill Mitchell was an atavistic throwback to an age when ethnic jokes by supervisors were uncomfortably endured by the brunt of that ‘humor’. An executive then could tell his secretary to order him up some hookers after a multiple martini lunch, knowing that she’d hold all calls and cover for him if his wife (or another executive) got jealous. As a result, in addition to whatever praise and criticism his aesthetic direction and management skills have garnered, Bill Mitchell’s legacy has been somewhat tarred with the brush of bigotry.

The question is are we being fair to the man? Are we applying contemporary standards to an era that was simultaneously more innocent and more evil in terms of racial, ethnic and other prejudice?

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Japanese carmakers are becoming increasingly worried about the Korean competition.

Everything looks good for South Korea:

• The Korean currency, the Won, is low
• Quality is improving
• Korea hammers out trade deal after trade deal, making Korean exports even cheaper

Japan on the other hand: Read More >

Imagine: It’s Friday evening, and the sun is down. You are rolling home in your environmentally responsible EV after an honest day’s work, emitting exactly zero greenhouse gases. You give a wave to your likewise electrified neighbor who’s bringing home the bacon to wife and family. You put the car in the garage and hook it up to the charger that nice electrician had installed. You shout “daddy’s home!” Suddenly, all hell breaks loose. Read More >

Giorgetto Giugiaro sold out to the tedeschi at Volkswagen. Bertone is teaching budding Chinese car designers in brutally cold Changchun. And now, the last vestige of inspired Italian car design is on the auction block: Pininfarina . Actually, they had hired the Italian investment bank Banca Leonardo in August 2009, but they took their time. Now, the bidding is getting serious. And guess who wants to take Pininfarina home. Read More >

Review any car priced between $18,000 and $28,000 lately, and someone’s bound to comment, “I’d much rather have a $20,000 Hyundai Sonata.” This hasn’t just been talk. Sales of the 2011 Sonata have exceeded Hyundai’s most fanciful expectations, leaving the car in short supply. Now, to add fuel to the fire, you can get the Sonata with a turbo. Should you? Well, it depends.

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The official MPG(e) ratings for Chevy’s Volt and Nissan’ Leaf have been out for a few days. Finally, The Nikkei [sub] noticed something: Nissan’s “all-electric Leaf has gained bragging rights in the U.S. market after garnering a higher fuel economy rating than the Chevrolet Volt.” Bragging rights bestowed courtesy of the U.S. government. Read More >

What is the difference between the November U.S. car market and my wife? The answer is: None. Edmunds says the U.S. annual sales rate for new vehicles in November will be essentially flat from the prior month. Read More >

BG writes:

Hi Sajeev! I am a big fan of TTAC and visit it almost every day. I have a question for you, so here it is:

We’ve heard so much about the goodness of wide wheel tracks, where the wheels are pushed to its corner. And the benefit of this seem natural and easy to comprehend for me, better handling, better looks, perhaps even better interior room if the wheel wells can be made less deep. It’s the other end of the spectrum, the narrow wheel tracks, that I can’t understand. What could possibly be the benefit of having a narrow wheel tracks? For some reason it used to be so popular, nearly all cars featured them. Even after the wide tracks was popularized by Pontiac in the 1960s, most cars still came with wheels that are placed well inside its openings. The only reason for them I can think of to justify that is if you want to use wheel skirts or low, “barely there” wheel openings, the Bathtub Nash being a good example. But most of these cars with narrow tracks have full wheel openings, at least in front. Why the narrow tracks then, I wonder?

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Why does the Nissan Leaf get a 99 MPG from the EPA? After all, you could pour gallons of gasoline into the thing and it wouldn’t budge an inch. It is, after all, an electric car. But hey, this ain’t America if a consumer can’t glance at a label and say “gosh honey, check out how many em-pee-gees this one gets. That sure is a whole lot of em-pee-gees.” And at least the EPA did include the most important detail: the Leaf’s battery range is rated 73 miles, or about three quarters the range Nissan had been claiming. Of course, as is always the case, your mileage may vary… only the amount of gasoline required by a Nissan Leaf won’t.

The Nissan Murano may start at a reasonable $28,500, but stepping up to the recently-announced CrossCabriolet version will set you back a healthy $46,390 (before $800 destination charge) according to Nissan ‘s website. That makes it the second most-expensive Nissan after the GTR, and it comes in only one trim level (with navigation, heated everything, a Bose system, HID headlights and more). So, why wasn’t the CrossCabrio released as an Infiniti again?

Hyundai could have timed this announcement a bit better. Wouldn’t the following announcement have been a fine crowning of  TTAC’s Korea week? Instead, the week ended unceremoniously with a reflection on thee shitboxes. From shitbox to market leader: Hyundai has kicked Toyota from the pedestal as the largest Asian carmaker in Europe. In a way. Read More >

Have you ever wondered what would happen if a man went out in the streets, throwing money in the air? Handing money out to passer-bys? Well Nissan decided to find out and hired an actor to do just that. It has created quite a ruckus! In more ways than one … Read More >